Sigils for Contemplation, Published by Mathers

The Grimoire of Armadel is a comparatively obscure grimoire consisting largely of sigils and brief instructions for making contact with angels and spirits in order to gain knowledge of divine mysteries, the fall of the angels, the secrets of creation, hidden sciences. In tone it is contemplative and revelatory rather than coercive: it is concerned with learning from spirits rather than binding demons to material ends.

The text survives in a seventeenth-century Latin manuscript in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal in Paris, and it reached modern readers through S. L. MacGregor Mathers, whose English translation was made in the late nineteenth century but published only in 1980. Its title and the name "Armadel" are of uncertain meaning. Like much of the Solomonic literature it mixes Christian devotion with operative magic, and its emphasis on receiving knowledge places it closer to the theurgic and angelic end of the tradition than to the frankly goetic grimoires.